September 18, 2006

Political, not judicial

Harold Sutton sent me a link to a piece in OpinionJournal. (And that was a ten days ago, and you've probably all already read and digested it and moved on.) It's on the lunacy of Hamdan, and why the founders did not intend for the judiciary to be involved in national defense...

...However patently central it is to a good society, the judicial function remains largely irrelevant to the international order. For all the blather about our "international community," it is an ersatz community, lying beyond our laws and democratic choices. Unlike dreamy modern internationalists, the Framers well understood that broad swaths of this "community"--enemies of the United States--would always pose threats, some existential, to the body politic.

Such threats are not legal problems. They do not principally involve Americans being deprived of their legal entitlements by their government--the cases and controversies judicial power was designed to resolve. They are clashes between the American national community and the outside world. They are the stuff of political power--diplomacy, force, and all the intermediate measures wielded by the political branches. The judicial power has no place because American courts are part and parcel of the American national community; they do not exist outside or above it....

The Hamdan decision is just another example of the sickness of our civilization. Hamdan rests on the supposition that there is something wrong with our defending ourselves. That if we are attacked by crazed killers, we should examine ourselves, and find ways to be more meek and humble. (And this has not the slightest connection to Christian humility. In fact it is profoundly anti-Christian.)

No. We are right, they are wrong. We are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. It is our duty to take off the gloves and fight as hard as we can. And win. And it is the duty of the Executive branch to do the job, and the duty of Congress to authorize, oversee and critique the work, and vote the funds.

The President is elected by ALL the people. If the people do not like the way he is running foreign policy, they can vote him out, as they have done many times in the past. Federal judges are not elected, and are almost impossible to remove. That privileged position rests on the assumption that they should confine themselves to a narrow role addressing specific cases, and not act as legislators or presidents. And alas, our history of the last half century is full of examples of them doing just that, mostly as a way to enact liberal legislation and social policies by fiat which would never be approved by the voters.

That's a sickness, and now the sickness has spread to enacting leftist foreign policy, a policy of appeasement, weakness and self-hatred. I think the President should have told the Court to take a hike, that Mr Hamdan's concerns are none of its business, and the decision was NULL because it infringes the Executive Branch's role as specified in our constitution. That was not a political possiblility, so we all need to vote Republican, and make sure sane judges are put on the bench in the future.

Posted by John Weidner at September 18, 2006 8:17 AM

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